Across the country, thousands of election officials, who have spent years getting ready for the 2024 election, are making their final preparations. Some are facing threats of violence, but they’re also preparing for the chance that any number of things could go wrong: blackouts, printer errors, broken scanners, medical emergencies, protests and locked doors.
To help them, a small federal agency developed an unusual practice tool: a deck of 52 cards that describes problems local officials could face. The cards pose situations like:
The agency, the Election Assistance Commission, has distributed 250 decks of cards to local election offices. The icons on the cards indicate where the problem lies: blue for online, orange for a voting location, green for a local election office, and red for a state office.
But the cards have no answers printed on them. That’s because there are no cookie-cutter solutions to these problems. Local officials develop their own contingency plans for Election Day, operating under laws and procedures that vary state by state, county by county and even town by town.
We asked a few of these officials to draw some cards — mostly over email, to fit their busy schedules. They told us about the minor catastrophes they’ve overcome, and what they might do if another problem came up this year.
Amid a flood of disinformation about election integrity, the scenario cards showed how these officials are ready for just about anything, and aren’t excessively worried about the big day.
“Elections are a human enterprise,” said Michael Siegrist, the township clerk in Canton, Mich., just outside Detroit, where tens of thousands of people will vote in this election. “We’ve been conducting them for hundreds of years. Nothing is really keeping me up at night.”
Below, how 10 election officials answered the scenarios posed by the cards.
This one is particularly relevant. There were fires at two ballot drop boxes in Washington and Oregon on Monday.
“There are so many safeguards and safety measures baked in that most Americans aren’t aware of, and they have been there for a long time,” said Benjamin Hovland, the commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission, which produced the scenario cards.
“Yes, we prepare for big things like natural disasters, but you also have to prepare for the small things, and sort of everything in between.”
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